Old Bones

You will know a Hapsburg by his jaw, an Assad by his chin, and a Kennedy by his incisors—but how to spot a Plantagenet? A couple of weeks ago, at the Tower of London, Michael Ibsen, the seventeenth-generation nephew of Richard III, moved unnoticed through the chambers in which his ancestor, five hundred years ago, presided over a nation in a state of unrest. Ibsen wore a faded barn jacket and a paisley scarf. A family resemblance was hard to detect in his pleasant face (Shakespeare’s Richard is “rudely stamp’d”) and regular limbs (“mine arm up like a wither’d shrub”). A fortnight earlier, researchers at the University of Leicester had announced that they had discovered a skeleton in a local parking lot, where the choir of the lost Church of Grey Friars, Richard’s supposed burial place, is thought to have stood. The corpse showed signs of scoliosis and injuries—trauma to the skull, a barbed-iron arrowhead wedged in the vertebrae of the upper back—consistent with those Richard sustained at the Battle of Bosworth Field, where he died, in 1485. Ibsen’s DNA will help determine whether the Leicester bones are indeed those of the Crouchback King.

Seven years ago, John Ashdown-Hill, a historian, called Ibsen’s mother, Joy, to notify her that she was a direct matrilineal descendant of Richard III’s sister Anne of York. (Joy died in 2008.) Until then, Ibsen, who grew up in Canada, had had no idea of his royal blood. (When he moved to London, he had to wait five years before he could apply for British citizenship.) “We knew that my mother came from an upper-class family, just littered with various illustrious bodies, but that was it,” he said. “I remember visiting these ancient spinster relatives down in the West Country and saying, ‘Mum, are we going to inherit this?’ ” They didn’t. Ibsen pursued a quiet life: the French horn, making furniture. Neither he nor his brother nor his sister had children. “They caught this particular link just in time,” Ibsen said. The news about Richard has excited his heirs as much as it has Britain’s masses—“ULTIMATE BADDY FOR BARD,” the Sun enthused. “It’s just a hunch. . . . We think we’ve found King Richard III”—but they are being careful not to get carried away. Ibsen recalled, “My sister e-mailed me the other day and said, ‘You know, there must have been plenty of hunchbacks at the time.’ ”

He walked under the toothy portcullis that defends the Bloody Tower from the Thames. It was there that, in 1483, Richard is said to have ordered the deaths of the vanished boy princes Edward V and Richard, Duke of York—Ibsen’s first cousins sixteen times removed. Historians are still haggling over the particulars of Richard’s reign. (The Leicester discovery would poleax the theory that his body was dumped into the River Soar.) In Britain, the mnemonic for the color spectrum is “Richard of York gave battle in vain.” (Roy G. Biv, another casualty of the Tudor ascension.) Ibsen finds himself in the strange position of feeling vicariously responsible for the actions of a much hated ancestor that he never knew he had. “If there’s a DNA link to the bones, it will have fairly profound emotional consequences,” he said. “I’m disinclined to believe that Richard was the nasty, evil person that history would have him be. But I would say that. Whom would you rather be related to?”

Schoolboys in short pants sat on a wall, eating sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. Ibsen climbed a spiral staircase and entered the room in which the princes are believed to have spent their last days. “It’s like picking up an old coin—you think of all the hands that have held it,” he said, examining some carved graffiti that had survived for centuries. He reflected on the brutishness of life in Richard’s era. “I couldn’t even lift one of those swords, yet they’re swinging them around inflicting appalling damage on people,” he said. “You read accounts of Richard having had twice as many men at Bosworth and then stupidly dashing into the middle of the battle. You think, What was going through his mind? Was he thinking, Here’s a chance to end it? Was he trying to bring calm and peace to a country that had had years and years of strife?”

A display presented the mystery of the princes’ deaths as a police procedural. It asked visitors to push a button to register the most likely suspect:

Murdered on the Orders of Henry VII, 13,535

Murdered on the Orders of Richard III, 21,820

Not Murdered but Disappeared, 14,350

“Think we’re on the losing end here,” Ibsen said, setting his pale lips into a doleful grimace that did not look entirely unfamiliar. He stared at the scoreboard. Henry VII: 13,536. ♦